In her new book, The Incidental Steward: Reflections on Citizen Science, Akiko Busch discusses how a thoughtful citizenry can learn, understand, and act upon their findings as they observe, closely, the rapidly changing natural world around them.  In reading her introductory remarks, in which she gives the pride of place to a quote from Edward O. Wilson—“We do not understand ourselves yet and descend further from heaven’s air if we forget how much the natural world means to us”— an overwhelming truth hit me square in the eye. As a long-time resident of the big city, I have forgotten my innate connections with the natural world. As I went deeper into Busch’s text, I came to a painful realization of what this careless disconnection has done to me. I now know that the further I have turned away from that natural world, the more impoverished I became, both intellectually and emotionally.

Busch’s examples of citizen scientists, those who regularly observe, record, and act upon the wrongs visited on the natural world in their own back yards, seem to have a deeper sense of place than those of us who stopped paying attention. In addition to using their keen powers of observation, these alert citizens take it upon themselves to share their findings with others through all kinds of social networking, thus adding to the sum total of human knowledge of our world.  They also get their hands dirty, like Busch and her cohorts have done in the Hudson Valley, where she made these observations about nature, human nature, and the nature of deep connections to place. Here, as she talks about her encounter with water chestnuts, she got me intrigued about Bats in the Locust Tree, Coyotes Across the Clear-Cut, Eels in the Stream, just a few of her evocative chapter headings I’ll be getting involved with next.—-SSS

Weeding water chestnuts (trapa natans) from the river is an exercise in which leisure and industry easily coincide; it’s a brand of gardening in which a sense of purpose can intersect with being languid. From time to time, I saw an elver, a juvenile American eel, winding around a stem or root like some weird extra plant appendage. Although the fish diversity is lower here than elsewhere on the river, eels can withstand the low oxygen levels of the water chestnut bed, all the while snacking on its assorted invertebrates. Yet if the eels swim off quickly, everything else seems to take its own time. Like anything else that is done in water, weeding is done slowly, as though it is possible to take on the liquid motion of what is around you. The stems can be pulled out with the gentlest tug; their attachment to the riverbed seems slight, their resistance imperceptible. Yet there is the smallest bit of spring to them, as though some bit of elastic thread has woven its way through the watery pink tendrils, and they have that sense of give that the most tenacious opponents sometimes seem to have. With a bit of stretch, these interlopers seem to be hanging on, though without much faith. And the mud on the bed of the river has a give, too; at each step, we sink in a bit. Perhaps this is why I am so drawn to the waterworld of rivers: nothing here stays the same for too long; things are always shifting, drifting, gently giving way. Read more…

What is Instagram? How do you use it? Why would you use it?

KI’s Aiden McGuire, IIDA’s Christa Payton, MarketSavant Group’s Dana Van Den Heuvel and Metropolis’ Kimberly Taylor and Grace Ehlers deliberated on the power of the social networking tool during the hour-long KI Social Media University webinar, entitled “InstaWham! The Power of Instagram in the Design Community”. Despite some skeptics in the audience (one quarter responded to a live poll that they felt Instagram was a fad), 69% of the audience felt that they would try Instagram out after the webinar for new product ideas and inspiration. And despite the 66% of the audience who ranked Pinterest as higher on their design industry “Wham-o-Meter,” the panelists agreed that Instagram’s average of 10,000 likes per second was a force to be reckoned within the design community and our global community at large.

If you missed our InstaWHAM webinar, you can view it in its entirety here:

InstaWHAM! The Power of Instagram in the Design Community from Metropolis magazine on Vimeo.